Sunday, March 2, 2008

Groovy Temporal Support Classes

Groovy adds a rich set of features to java including closures, ranges, dynamic metaClass, access to existing java code base, etc. What is missing is full featured date processing. One approach to fixing this is to use existing libraries of java date extensions, such as joda time. Today I decided to implement some basic date/time features without a third party dependency. I may end up using joda as the project unfolds, but for now I'm trying to resist the temptation.

HourMinuteSecond: This class acts as a container and formatter of hours, minutes and seconds similar to groovy's TimeDuration class. In native form it's completely mutable, so not thread safe. But it can be made immutable by invoking asImmutable(). I'll explain how groovy makes this easy to implement later on.

The object can be used as a simple up/down timer measured in seconds. When attached to a one second ticker thread, only the next() method needs to be invoked to tally up the seconds. Used as a count down timer, an event is triggered when zero is reached.

The methods are actually closures, so creating the immutable clone was as simple as pointing all the mutators to a single closure that throws an UnsupportedOperationException when a mutating method is called. This mimics how groovy's List.asImmutable() method works.

I will post more as the temporal project unfolds, and supply a link once the library is ready for distribution.